


nights were mainly made

by flowermasters



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: "Hate" sex, Bellamy Blake Makes Questionable Choices Part 1/∞, Canon Compliant, F/M, First Time, Pre-Relationship, Rough Sex, Sparring, Trust Issues, Unsafe Sex, honestly pre-friendship lol, time jump fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 10:13:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17999885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermasters/pseuds/flowermasters
Summary: Bellamy and Echo spar for the first time together on the Ring. Things take a turn.





	nights were mainly made

**Author's Note:**

> There's a few fics out there depicting Bellamy and Echo either entering a FWB situation or finally falling into bed together after years of pining on one or both of their parts, and I've written a few of those myself, so I decided to try a different take. Yay for one night stands involving someone you're going to see every day for the next 5+ years.
> 
> Warnings for: sexual content (not super explicit but ... pretty explicit), canon-typical violence, mildly rough sex, unsafe sex because, y'know, what is birth control in this universe, anyway. Also, what I would classify as a minor consent issue, in the sense that both parties are consenting adults but neither party really stops to be like "hey, let's discuss."

The thud of his fists against the bag must be carrying down the hall, but Bellamy’s beyond caring. He’s entered a light trance thanks to the mindless motion and to the steady, unrelenting crackle of static from the comms, numb all over except for the sparks of pain every time his fists make contact with the punching bag. It’s the numbness he’s trying to drive away, with gritty, steely-eyed determination, but all he gets for his trouble is a shooting pain up his arm.

He almost broke the computer at the comms station earlier. After six months of absolutely no word from anybody on Earth, and with not much hope for it according to Raven, he’s about goddamn ready to snap. He had been seized by such a sudden burst of anger as he sat listening to the static that he raised his fist, fully prepared to bring it down on the flat screen in front of him, and only one thought—Octavia, never hearing from Octavia, never knowing she’s alive in five whole years—kept him from doing it. He unclenched his fist, lowered it slowly, and then he was on his feet, abandoning his useless vigil at the radio. The punching bag came next.

They keep it in the mess, ostensibly so that it’s available to everyone, but he and Echo are the only ones who can ever be found using it. Murphy and Emori and Harper and Monty have their own ways of passing the time, respectively, and Raven’s own brain keeps her occupied, her head constantly bowed over one screen or another as she runs calculation after calculation. Echo, when he’s seen her go at the punching bag, seems to be relying on it to keep her strength up, going through various katas using the bag as an opponent. Bellamy’s only seen her using it in the early mornings when nobody else is awake, when his own cognitive abilities are dulled with sleep as he stumbles to the comms to check if any messages have been received overnight. As such, he remembers those moments rather vaguely, her grace and her deadliness blurry, out of focus to his mind’s eye, though hardly forgotten.

He’s not sure how much longer he’s at it before she appears in the flesh, creeping up on him out of the Ark’s artificial, yellow-lit night. “Bellamy,” she says from the entranceway to the mess, as if by way of a greeting.

Her voice is quiet, her tone neutral and unthreatening, but Bellamy startles, fist landing awkwardly with a _smack_. It doesn’t hurt, but only because his hands have finally gone numb from all the hits. “Hey,” he says, trying to maintain composure as he goes still, looking over his shoulder at her. “I didn’t see you there.”

She must’ve been in bed, as it is—he notes by looking at the clock—almost two A.M. She’s wearing something she might normally wear, leggings and tank top and boots, but her hair is loose, free of any of her usual ornamental braids. Her features look softer than normal, and he’s not sure if it’s the hair hanging in her face or the dim light or the late hour.

“I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you,” she says, and there it is, the edge of wariness in her voice. Maybe he got wary first. He’s not sure. He’s too tired to regulate himself the way he normally does around her.

He’s civil with Echo, of course. There’s no point in being anything but. After six months, they’re even able to hold normal conversations, though they never speak about anything having to do with those last few weeks on Earth before Praimfaiya. Their discussions are mostly relegated to Earth customs versus Ark life; how to catch fish without a net or rod versus what tofu is. There is a fragile peace.

When Bellamy just shrugs, Echo walks past him and disappears through the door to the kitchens. Hands still slightly numb and at a loss for what to do until she heads back to her room, Bellamy goes about unwinding the cloth strips he wears over his knuckles, wincing in discomfort. It’s hardly protective, the fabric—harvested from medical gowns from the infirmary and too thin to be made into anything other than bandages, the cloth is nevertheless the closest he can come to gloves.

Echo returns a moment later with two cups. “I brought you some—” she says, before she realizes what he’s doing, her eyes catching on his bruising knuckles, bloody in places where the skin has caught over the bone and torn slightly. “Are you alright?”

He can tell by the way her gaze flicks quickly back up to his face that she doesn’t just mean his hands. Still, he does his best to hide them, casually sliding them into the pockets of his sweatpants. “Fine,” he says.

Echo narrows her eyes slightly, as if assessing this, and then approaches him. “Water,” she says, offering him one of the small cups.

Bellamy raises his eyebrows. “Thanks,” he says, removing a hand from his pocket to accept her offer. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he is until he goes to take a sip, and almost drains the cup in one go, closing his eyes to savor it. When he opens them again a few seconds later, Echo is watching him, still standing just a couple feet away.

“Did I wake you?” he asks. He tips his head to one side to indicate the punching bag. Her room is down the hall a ways, just past his own, but it’s conceivable that she might have heard. “The noise, I mean.”

“No,” Echo says, still watching him. Studying him. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, being watched by her and knowing her as he does; knowing that she has the mind of a strategist, a saboteur, an assassin. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me, neither,” Bellamy says. That much is fairly obvious.

“Are your hands alright?” Echo asks, both of her own hands clasped loosely around her cup. “You could injure yourself this way.”

Bellamy shrugs again. “Could injure myself a lot of ways around here,” he points out. “I know when to quit.”

Echo raises her eyebrows, and there it is—the coolness and regality he normally associates with the angles of her face. “Do you?”

Surprising himself, Bellamy huffs a sharp laugh. “Sometimes.”

He breaks eye contact and moves toward the table where more cloth strips lie, unsure in the moment whether he plans to bandage his hands or wrap them again for another bout. He expects Echo to leave once his back is turned, but instead she speaks again. “If you think you would benefit from it,” she says, tone slightly cautious once more, “we could spar together sometime. To keep our skills sharp.”

Bellamy is quiet for a moment, looking down at the cloth in his hands. Then he turns to her. “We could spar right now,” he says. “If you want.”

Echo, to her credit, only blinks. He expects her to say no—it’s the middle of the night, after all, and the artificial dawn will come early. It would surely be better to wait until another time, or perhaps to forgo this altogether. The last time they fought, after all, he nearly killed her with his bare hands. But he knows it’s not fear that holds her back.

Then she says, “Are you sure?”

“I’m not getting any sleep tonight,” Bellamy says, gesturing vaguely around the room. Behind them, the radio sputters, but it’s nothing, just the rise and fall of static. “Not unless I burn off some energy.”

Echo gives him one last, long, searching look, as if waiting for him to change his mind. He probably should, but he doesn’t. “Alright,” she says, then holds out her hand. “Some cloth, please.”

He holds out the clean strips of fabric, watching in slight fascination as she sits her cup down on the table and begins to deftly braid her hair, tying a strip of fabric to secure the end. “What’re the rules here?” he asks. “Open fist?”

“If you like,” Echo says, bending down to unlace her boots. Once she toes them off, along with her socks, she moves to the open area of the room beyond the punching bag. He watches for a few seconds, a little startled, as she begins moving through a series of quick stretches. Then he pulls his eyes away from the play of muscles under her skin and joins her in the open area, following suit in taking off his shoes and stretching.

He doesn’t ask any more questions, though the logical little voice in his head is warning him away from this whole thing, reminding him that a fight with Echo, even a simulated one, is ill-advised for a variety of reasons. Namely, she’s a lot more trained than he is, they have no doctor, and this whole thing could dredge up some uncomfortable memories. But still he doesn’t ask any more questions.

Echo rises to her feet once more, and Bellamy scrambles to his own when he realizes she’s waiting on him. She doesn’t do anything dramatic, no war cries or spinning kicks to begin the fight; Azgeda warriors tend to be flashy with their cruelty, but Echo is far smarter than the average warrior. She begins to pace back and forth, her eyes on him, as if waiting for him to begin.

So he does, squaring his shoulders, bending his elbows, and barrelling forward, but of course she wanted him to do this; she dodges his clumsy attempt at a grab easily, moving so quickly that her braid swings out like a whip behind her. “I’m out of practice,” Bellamy admits, turning quickly to face her again.

“I can tell,” she says, cool as ice water, and the frisson of irritation that rises through him is strangely welcome. He can’t exactly begrudge her her superior tone; she’s better at him than this. But not _that_ much better.

This time she rushes him, and instead of sidestepping her—difficult to do with his relative bulk—he lets her swing at him. This allows him to grab her arm and pull her in, rough, trying to get his other arm around her so he can bring her to the floor—but a sharp kick to his shin makes him double over slightly, grunting, and she breaks free of his hold and backs out of reach.

“When I was young,” she says unexpectedly, resuming her slow stalk back and forth, “my _seda_ used to tell me that I was slippery. Like an eel.”

“Let me guess,” Bellamy says, backing a few feet farther away, so that she’ll have to take a running start if she wants to come at him. “That’s high praise in your culture.”

Echo smiles faintly. “There’s no such thing as praise in my culture.”

She bolts at him, and on they fight. Feinting, swinging, dodging, grunting. Her open palm cracks across his cheek so hard that he tastes blood, but she doesn’t apologize and he doesn’t want her to. It’s a powerful, animal thing, the fight—the kind of raw adrenaline he hasn’t felt in six months now. Survival on the Ark is, outside of worst-case scenarios, a slow and steady trudge. It doesn’t occur to him again that she might actually hurt him; oddly enough, he trusts that she won’t, and not just because her self-preservation instinct runs too strong to risk making an enemy of him again. Echo might have always pretended otherwise, but she has to be tired of making enemies.

He picks her up at one point, arms around her waist, her back to his chest, and realizes in that instant how light she is compared to him, tall and leanly-muscled but with the ranginess of the ground-born, someone for whom meals were never truly guaranteed. He means to throw her to the ground, but she holds on tight to his arms and draws her legs up, throwing her weight in one direction so that he goes down with her, both of them landing hard on their sides. She rolls away before he’s recovered from the pain that radiates through him, but then he’s back up, too, unwilling to be left in the dust. Metaphorically speaking.

“What?” Bellamy says, breathing ragged, when she starts doing that circling-him thing again. Her eyebrows are up, her expression unbothered, but her chest is heaving, too. “You got something to say, I’m all ears.”

“You want to defeat me too badly,” Echo says. “It makes you predictable.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Bellamy says, watching her, taking a wary step backwards when she transits a little too close. “That’s the point.”

“In a real fight, you’d be fighting to survive,” Echo says, her gaze steady, her eyes almost black in the bad light. She reminds him a little of a predator in tall grass, although she’s slowing her strides now. He’s not sure if that means she’s getting distracted or she’s about to attack. “Not to prove something or to find an outlet for your anger. Defeating me would mean life or death.”

Bellamy swallows. “Not anymore, I thought.”

This, for once, seems to give Echo pause. “No,” she agrees, her expression ever watchful. “Not anymore.”

They meet in the middle this time, and Bellamy swings with an open hand, aiming for her neck, but she blocks his blow. Her leg comes up swiftly, knee connecting with his solar plexus, and even as the wind whooshes out of him and his knees buckle he has the presence of mind to grab onto her leg as he goes down.

Bellamy lands hard on his ass, wheezing, and Echo flails but manages to correct herself on the way down, landing with her knees on either side of his outstretched legs rather than squarely on top of him. They both grunt in pain at the impact. Bellamy grabs hold of her hips instinctively and holds on tight, fight or flight reflex colliding with the muscle memory of reacting to someone in his lap. Her tank top is just low cut enough that the heave of her breasts is intensely distracting with her this close, but his eyes—spotty though his vision is at the moment—catch on her parted lips, the flush in her cheeks. _Fuck_ , he thinks. _Fuck._

“Bellamy?” Echo says, and though her voice betrays nothing, there’s a spark of fear in her eyes. She can’t hide it, not this close, not as she leans closer. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” he says, voice gravelly, and he leans forward slowly but surely, conscious enough that he should give her time to pull away. She doesn’t, and so he kisses her at last in a rush, hard, squeezing her hips under his hands until she gasps into his mouth, a noise that’s half pain and half hitching excitement.

She gasps again when he tugs her in closer, fitting her more snugly in his lap, and then she bites his lower lip. He thinks she means for him to stop and let her go, but when he starts to pull away she follows, sucking at his lower lip as if to soothe. She’s reciprocating, then, and eagerly; when he moves to kiss her jawline and neck, the thrum of her pulse, she slides her hands up under the back of his sweat-damp shirt, rasping, “Take this off.”

He does. He should stop this now, while he still can, but he doesn’t. He should think of his sister, of his sister toppling backwards off a cliff. The people who died in Mount Weather, the tender spot in his heart for Gina. All of those things occur to him in succession, and yet when he bites at Echo’s neck, it’s not to take out her jugular.

Her tank top soon follows, and then her leggings and underwear in one swift move shortly thereafter. He sucks and kisses at her breasts as she works blindly at the drawstring tie of his pants, and then her movements slow when he slips his fingers between her legs. She’s slick already, and Bellamy nips at her collarbone, savagely pleased, wondering if it was the fight that made her so.

He’s not the sort that likes hurting people during sex, at least not in a way they haven’t asked for, but his touch isn’t exactly gentle when he slips two fingers into her. Her mouth falls open when he presses his thumb to her clit. “Okay?” he asks.

Echo nods, meeting his eyes for a split second before she leans in to kiss him again. Her hands claw down his bare back when he crooks his fingers, and he grunts, that vicious sense of pleasure spiking, the same strange satisfaction of pushing down on a bruise to feel the ache.

When she comes she seems to lose a little bit of her fine motor function, her head tipping forward slightly, mouth going slack as she lets out a soft, breathy noise. The sound inspires an unexpected burst of something in Bellamy’s chest, and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t feel like protectiveness, an urge to both pull her close but also to look away, to allow Echo her moment of weakness. Those moments are hard-won from someone like Echo, and Bellamy’s still in a state of not-so-slight disbelief that she’s allowing this at all.

But he’s not blind. He’s seen the way Echo looks at him, the way her eyes will go a little wide sometimes, only to narrow again or quickly look away. He’s not immune to whatever magnetism exists between them, pulling them together and pushing them apart again and again. They’ve saved each other’s lives as many times or more as they’ve hurt one another. He’s picked up on some things along the way, and he’s put those things in a box somewhere, to be opened and investigated or to gather dust.

She pushes his hand away, and he watches as she—looking like a woman possessed—unknots the tie of his pants and then, with a little help from him, tugs them down as best she can without getting off his lap. They haven’t strayed from their original position, and Bellamy’s grateful for it. Ironically, he trusts Echo more in a position of control than he does out of one.

He grabs her hips again as she wraps a warm, calloused palm around him to line them up, and then he squeezes as she slides down on him. Her hips are sharp, the point of bone pressing into his palms, but the curve of her ass is soft, and so is the skin of her lower back and the tickle of her long hair, which he pulls loose from its braid.

Her thighs flex, and as she begins to move he groans, loud and guttural. He’s been longer without sex before in his adult life—the year he spent alone, working sanitation, comes to mind, although he pushes it quickly away—but he spent so much of his relatively brief time on the ground running, killing, fighting tooth and nail for survival. To go from that back to life on the Ark, a life where every day feels like an eternity again, has been—disorienting, to put it lightly. He’s been losing his mind up here. The quick, dirty grind of their hips feels like a poison being drawn out of him. Bellamy thinks of leaning back, giving himself more leverage to thrust up against her, but instead he just rocks his hips and tips his head forward, letting his forehead rest on Echo’s shoulder as she rises and falls over his lap. He has the presence of mind to be surprised when she lifts her arms, cradling his head close to her and carding her fingers through his hair.

When she slips a hand between their bodies to work at herself he lifts his head, then lifts a hand to take a gentle but firm hold of her hair, close to her scalp. She meets his eyes, her expression going distant the closer she gets. “Yeah, Echo,” he grits out at her, tightening his hold when she gasps, high-pitched, tight enough that she focuses her gaze on him again. “Come on, give it to me.”

When she comes she is still frustratingly quiet, squeezing her eyes shut and breathing shakily, but she scratches at the back of his neck surely hard enough to leave welts. The rhythm goes jerky, and then a moment later she sits back slightly on her haunches so that he slips free of her. He lets out a plaintive noise without even really thinking about it, a moan of confusion and loss, and she moves in close again, cradling his head against the crook of her neck with one hand as she takes his dick in the other. He wants anger from her, he wants pain, all the pent-up Azgeda ruthlessness she can provide, and yet she offers him tenderness.

In the moments after he finishes, Bellamy finds not the relief he’d expected, nor the peace he must have been searching for, but a heady dose of fatigue. Still, after the frantic, consuming unrest that has held him tonight, even exhaustion is welcome. Echo doesn’t drop the hand that twines through the curls at the back of his head, body still except for the movement of her other arm as she, presumably, reaches for something to wipe her hand off on.

It’s the shifting of her shoulder under his cheek that does it, the movement—impeded by the weight of his head—reminding him that while he shouldn’t have done this at all, he certainly can’t fucking linger like this. He clears his throat quietly, tips his head back, and meets her eyes for lack of anywhere else to look.

She looks a little surprised, at first, but only briefly. He’s seen this response from her before, in the Mountain, in the forest, in Polis as she was dealt her banishment. Watching her go dead-eyed and haughty again, shoulders stiffening and thighs tensing, feels a little bit like watching a wall being erected. He thinks, unbidden, of a cage door snapping shut, only in this scenario he’s on the outside of the cage, despicably grateful to see Echo hiding herself away. It will make this whole thing much easier to forget about, he hopes.

She climbs off of his lap without preamble, one of her knees creaking in the sudden quiet. All this time it’s felt as though they were making a great deal of noise, but in retrospect, perhaps not so much. Bellamy rights himself more slowly than Echo had by necessity, his body sore and achy now in the absence of endorphins from fighting and fucking. She doesn’t give the appearance of hurrying, but she’s already half-dressed in the time it takes Bellamy to get his shirt back on.

He watches as she bends down to lace up her boots, her hair cascading over her shoulders. “I guess I don’t have to say that this can’t happen again,” he hazards.

Echo glances up at him past the curtain of her hair, her dark eyes flinty, then straightens. “You can spare us both the speech. Understood.”

“Echo,” he says, unsure of where he’s headed. He hadn’t expected resistance on this point, as her body language alone indicates she’s eager to be rid of him. Still, receiving nothing but her cool regard leaves him floundering a bit. He thinks of apologizing, although he doesn’t know that he ought to, if it might not make it worse to do so for no explicit reason. They’re both adults, and she seemed to have enjoyed herself in the moment; it was stupidly done on both their parts. All he knows is that for a moment he’s seized by the same weirdly protective feeling as before, though it is quickly stifled.

When he makes no attempt to finish his thought, Echo moves forward. “Good night, Bellamy,” she says, glancing only briefly at him as she passes, gazing evenly ahead otherwise. “I hope the bout was helpful to you.”

He doesn’t return her goodbye; she doesn’t give him time, disappearing into the corridor before he gets his bearings. He’s too tired to try to smooth things over any further, too selfish and perhaps a little too cowardly to follow after her until he can be sure she’s had enough of a headstart to be out of sight.

When he passes the communal bathroom, he can hear the sound of the Ark’s weary pipes running, water beginning to flow in a shower out of sight; he tries not to be offended by this, and in fact tries not to think of it at all. When he makes it back to his quarters, he thinks briefly of the radio, but the urge to go back and listen _just in case_ is easily ignored in favor of kicking off his boots and falling, at last, into bed.

He sleeps well for the few hours remaining till dawn, but when he wakes the cloud of shame and regret is difficult to ignore, the price of his deep sleep. He resolutely does not think of his sister or Echo or anyone else as he showers and walks to breakfast that first morning after. The last time he’d had one-off sex with someone he actually knows, it was with Raven. Even with comparatively far less baggage between them at the time than there was between him and Echo now, that had immediately felt like a mistake—but their friendship had endured and flourished afterwards, namely because they had quickly been distracted by other things. There are no such distractions up here, and Echo—though no longer an enemy—is not a friend, either.

But Echo, to her credit, is nothing if not discreet, and her tone and expression are completely neutral the next morning when she asks Bellamy to pass her a spoon from the pile at the end of the table. Somehow he’d forgotten that she is a spy, prodigiously talented at hiding and obscuring things. Slippery, like an eel.

It takes a couple weeks, but they’re able to carry on casual conversations, limited once more to inoffensive topics like history and food. Bellamy, curious, even asks about her teacher, about her early years as a novitiate of the Azgedan Royal Guard. She’s hesitant, perhaps wary of his judgment, but she has many stories to tell.

It takes a couple months more to return in full force, but the itch for activity remains, difficult to scratch. He finds her one afternoon sitting at the table in the mess and patching a pair of leggings, tedious, familiar work. When Bellamy broaches the subject, well within the (artificial) daylight hours now, it’s not without a hint of trepidation. “If you’re up for it,” he says, “maybe we could spar for a bit.”

Echo looks up, her eyebrows lifting. She meets his gaze for a moment, and he reads the understanding in her eyes, tempered slightly by a brief, wide-eyed flicker of something he can’t make as much sense of, something that looks almost like hopefulness. At any rate, there’s little hesitation in her voice as she agrees.


End file.
